Rubrik Reviews

I don't know if it is the best or the worst but it's very easy to install and very easy to balance. Sometimes that it's a problem because the installer of these data gets extremely scared because it's so easy. The product is easy to install, easy to balance, and easy to work with. Another really good point is the instant recovery.

The recovery of virtual machines and SQL databases is really fast. I mean half the time or less, which is absolutely great.

I have been using Rubrik for one and a half years. 

They could make it a little bit more robust and more reliable.

We don't require any technical people for maintenance. When Rubrik was first establishing itself, we hired help for the first one or two times but the rest is so easy. The very first one, somebody has to do it, but for the second or third one, you can do it by yourself. It could be very good or very bad, depending on what you think. If you are trying to sell professional services, with Rubrik you are dead.

We've had support from Rubrik, we opened a couple of requests. It was a really fast response and they solved the problem very easily. We don't a lot of experience, just a couple of tickets but well, pretty well solved.

The initial setup was easy. The PowerPoints take something like an hour or two. Whatever the goal is, if you find problems, and you find a heavy percent of the problems are networking problems, you have the ports that need to be opened, and the person in charge of opening the ports is on vacation. But from PowerPoint to real life, there is not a big difference. The PowerPoint says an hour or two but starting from scratch to do backups, takes a few hours.

There is not a big difference between Rubrik and Cohesity. Both companies and both products are clearly the same. There are a lot of differences between Rubrik or Cohesity and the old-fashioned kind of solutions like Veritas. Rubrik represents the new way of doing backups and recoveries, it's totally different, more efficient, and easier. It's absolutely an advantage.

My advice would be when you are thinking about implementing Rubrik you need professional services and proper briefings. You need advice on-site and for configuring the system because the new way of doing things, deduplication, and all those kinds of things, is going to be a necessary configuration to run your backup system. It is very important to do it right at the beginning. To do that, you have to work closely with whatever the partner or Rubrik people you can involve.

I would rate Rubrik an eight out of ten. 

The recovery of Oracle databases is too complicated. It is not something that helps the DBA, the Database Administrator, but it should be done by the backup person like many other solutions. Everything is ready for the DBA to recover the database. It is a way of doing things, but I don't think you should give the backup people the ability to do it.

We use this solution extensively - it helps with fast recovery scenarios and some ransomware issues. The solution is used by the operations department and I believe there are more than five people involved in maintenance, most are storage or network admins. I'm an engagement architect.

The live mount capability is the most valuable feature in the product because it reduces the complexity and gives us good RTO.

The user interface could be improved, it's pretty rough.

I've been using this solution since it was introduced into the market about four or five years ago. 

There is good stability in this solution, it's reliable.

The solution is highly scalable and reliable. We have a lot of users in the company, most are storage and backup admins. Not everyone has access to the backup system. 

Rubrik customer support is excellent. 

I have used Veritas in the past. We switched to Rubrik because the solution offered more. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment to about three hours, no more. The setup time really depends on net issues. 

This product is easy to manage. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We use it for backup and recovery; system protection is an even a better way to describe the use case. We not only have a backup of our data but it also provides disaster recovery. While having your data is important, having the ability to return to production, within minutes of an issue — which means standing up the whole VM at a point in time — is way more important in today's world than it is to just have a copy of your data.

It's protecting both physical and virtual environments. It protects Windows, Linux — multiple flavors — as well as Microsoft SQL and Oracle Databases. We have two bricks and we're protecting about 175 machines, both physical and virtual. It has been about 98 percent VMs, and probably even higher than that. We're a VM shop. 

We are protecting all of our SQL databases with the native SQL tools within Rubrik, through which we can do all of our table restores at a point in time, depending on the database itself. We are using multiple different archives with multiple different SLAs, both on-premise and to AWS.

Our deployment of the solution is primarily on-prem.

The SLA-based policy has had a positive effect on our data protection operations. I'm going to be going even deeper into the automation part, to use some of the newer features that have just come out in this release. It's going to be great to be able to just tag a machine in Virtual Center and its backups will be taken care of. That will help our process in terms of protecting machines that need to be protected and it will remove a step that people don't necessarily remember to do.

In the 5.0 release, they added the ability to back up Oracle Databases, natively, similar to how SQL servers are done, and that's going to be a big win for us. Hopefully it will reduce our storage size because we back up many databases that have a lot of the same data in them. Today we can only do it as a big blob so we don't get any space savings in that respect.

In terms of recovery time, it saves us days. The last time that we had a major system go belly-up, it was three or four days before we had the system back to being functional. In contrast, I was able to return a system that was being a pain due to some vendor-patching, multiple times, back to a known state, and within minutes. Granted, they weren't the same systems, but it would have been virtually the same thing if I had been able to do that with the major system that was down for days. Fortunately it doesn't happen that often, but in that particular patching case where I was using it, it felt like I did it about ten times. The vendor-patch was not going well, so I had to keep bringing it back multiple times, in a very short amount of time. But typically it has not been that much of an issue.

In addition, with the multi-tenancy feature that they added, back in one of the later 4-trains, we've been able to provide another team within our organization access to be able to manage their own backups, and only see their servers. They are able to only touch and change stuff for their owns systems. In theory, that also gives them the ability to do their own restarts if they ever need to. Our previous system had really no way to handle that, so it's been pretty fantastic.

Overall, I would say Rubrik has saved us a lot of time managing backups. I used to spend a minimum of about 50 percent of my time doing just nursing our backup system. Now, I might spend one percent of my time a week looking at the backups. There's not much that I need to do, other than just keep an eye on the system to make sure that nothing crazy has gone on. But I spend virtually no time, at this point, dealing with the backup system to make sure that it's still running. It's been a big help. Since I'm not spending as much time dealing with the backups or doing any sort of recovery, we have been able to actually work on other projects and other needs of the organization.

It has also helped to reduce downtime. We had one production server that went down and we were able to get it back up in just a couple minutes. In comparison, if we had needed to rebuild that entire server, that would have taken days, and possibly longer, due to needing to reload the applications. That is not, sometimes, a trivial matter.

The database backups, where you can go to a point in time, are huge.

The instant-on recovery is another huge bonus to the system. It lets you get a system back up and running within minutes if you need to, instead of having to try restoring it all out to your primary storage. That becomes a huge deal when you have a system that's down and people want it back up as soon as possible.

The archiving, off-of-box, is awesome. It lets you put your data where you want it and gives you the peace of mind of having more than one copy of it. And it's smart about the way that it does the archiving. It doesn't just copy one-for-one. It does all of its processing of the deduplication and compression before it sends it off to the archive, which helps with our cloud costs. Before, we weren't doing anything to the public clouds. But the amount of storage that we're actually storing in AWS is a lot smaller than what it would have been if we had just done a normal copy-out.

Rubrik's web interface is fantastic. I can get to it from pretty much any device. It's responsive, it's simple, it's clean, and it's easy to find stuff. One of our main goals when we picked the solution was that it would be something that was simple to use; that someone could do so without having to go to like a lot of training. In an emergency, if someone else needed to log in and figure out how to do something, they most likely could do it through the web interface. It's definitely user-friendly.

There are some improvements that could be made to the web portal itself to make life easier. It comes down to the usability, to being able to use the system wherever you are. While it's pretty user-friendly, there are little quirks to it that could easily be changed. 

Also, the deployment and configuration of the backup service is something that could be streamlined a little bit, particularly when you're trying to do a SQL workload. You have to install a backup service on the server. You only have to do it once and then you're done, but you have to do that on every server that you want to protect. We are backing up about 170 servers at the moment. There isn't an onerous number of tasks, but there are some things that you have to remember to do. And if you haven't done it at all, or not in a long time, you may or may not know to do them. I would think that, like in the installation wizard, they should be able to step you through that type of stuff, or at least give you a reminder. It's something simple but something that could be improved. 

It's been very stable. We've not had any issues with the system. It has performed well since day one and we're on our fourth or fifth different code line.

Scalability is pretty simple. We had initially started off with our two bricks in a replication pair, and then we needed to bring that replicated pair into the main system. I worked with support, decomm'ed the replication target, got that brick reset, and then brought it into the cluster. That took just a couple hours, but that included the fact that I had to physically move the box. But it was extremely simple and, once it was in, it operated just as you would have expected. All of the certificates copied over and I was able to contact all of the nodes exactly how I would've expected. It was pretty seamless.

Performance-wise, we might be using five or ten percent of the performance that's available through the system. After that initial ingest, you're only really copying changes, and most of our changes are relatively small in comparison to what the system can actually handle. 

In terms of features, we're only using five or ten percent of the features that are in the system. I was working on using some other features and then the need went away. It was taking a snapshot of a database and from one server and restoring it onto another server, but the need went away so I stopped working on that.

As new things come out, they move us forward. They just released a feature for the archives and cleaning them up. I must've missed it in one of the release notes, so when I ran across it I said to myself, "Oh, I better go in and enable this." Low and behold, it did exactly what we needed it to do and it saved us double digits of terabytes on our archive locations, which was great because we were running out of space. When they added the ability to link VM's between virtual centers, I enabled that one. As new features are released I'll implement them. There are quite a number of features, such as all of the integration with NetApp and Pure Storage, which I can't use because I don't have that storage. I can only use the features that make sense for us.

Tech support has been fantastic. They will bend over backward to help get solutions. The biggest thing that we use them for is to do the upgrades to the software. Since they have global support people, I'm not having to either patch a system in the middle of the day or having to change our backup windows. They have someone available after our backup window ends but before the beginning of our business day. It's not in the middle of the night for them either, they're coming in at their normal time. It's been great. Plus, on the human side, they're not forcing people to work a third shift to support us on the other side of the world. They give someone a normal shift and make the support experience positive.

We had been using ARCserve for about 18 years before we switched. Sometimes it's referred to as CA ARCserve and sometimes just ARCserve. It went through a couple of different incarnations. It got spun off at one point, so it's a hit or miss as to what it's known as.

We decided to switch because our system was way out of date, and in terms of performance, our backups were taking so long that we couldn't actually complete them. The restore time was abysmal. It took days to restore if we needed a large chunk of data. The maintenance of it, in terms of the human capital, was intense. As I said, I was using at least 50 percent of my time per week just trying to make sure that the backups completed, as much as they could, for that week. We were starting to run into the scale issue, where we couldn't back up our data and export it off to tape within any amount of time that was reasonable. 

We were also way out of space. One of the biggest management issues was that I had to keep moving stuff around. I had to arrange things such that, "That job has got to go over here because there's enough room for it. And this job has to go over here because there's enough room for that one." We did a project and we came across Rubrik and it was the best decision that we've made.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was the easiest setup that we had on all of the systems that we had looked at before we bought them. When we moved from our PoC to production, we actually handled the setup of the second brick when it came in. We didn't even need to engage their field engineers to help us.

There were two of us involved, me and a colleague who is the senior network engineer. The deployment took about four hours. We actually redeployed both of them, the whole system, within four hours. We tore up the old PoC stuff, refreshed it all, and then started over with it because some stuff had changed and we needed to restart it. We did the whole system within about four hours.

In terms of implementation strategy, we cut over from our old system as fast as we could. We started with our large and most important system. We let that sit there and bake and perform its initial backup. Once that was done, we started porting every machine over that we could. It was great with the way that the system worked. We just went through our list of systems that we needed to move. He started at the top and I started at the bottom and we just checked them off, made sure that we got them all in. We then stopped all of the legacy jobs on the previous system and we were up and running on the new system within less than a week.

The biggest ROI is a lot of hidden costs. With the lower amount of management time, I've been able to focus on doing a whole lot of other work. Nobody has done a full ROI comparison, but just in my time savings it's been huge. I've not needed to do a whole lot of work on the Rubrik system itself.

We pay yearly and it's based on the number of bricks. Each brick has a set cost, which I don't know off the top of my head. I don't handle the money side of things.

We have not had any other cost from them since we did the initial purchase. The only other thing that I know you can even buy are some of the connectors to the cloud: cloud-on and cloud-out. But we're currently not using them.

Our project started off with eight vendors. We whittled it down and PoC'ed four of them and ultimately chose Rubrik.

The ones we focused on were a Veeam/ExaGrid combo, and Cohesity was another one. We also looked at the newer product from ARCserve, their UDP product.

• The main difference was simplicity. Rubrik was heads-and-shoulders above the rest of them in terms of ease of use. 
• There was also the installation of the system and the infrastructure to run the system. Rubrik was head-and-shoulders above the other three. 
• Performance-wise, in terms of raw numbers, Rubrik was not the highest performant one, but that's also due to the way they value the systems in production. They don't try to stun the workloads while they're trying to back them up. You can work with support and change that, but that really only comes into play on your first ingest. After that, they were as performant as some of the other ones and way better than some of them.
• The last thing was that what they said they did — the features they had and what they said would happen — actually did happen. 

When we were evaluating the agent, or as Rubrik calls it, the backup service, theirs actually worked. One of their competitors' agents did not work and we were told that it was our fault that it didn't work, and for it to work we would have had to rebuild all of our Linux systems to meet their recommendations or specifications. That was a huge negative on their side, but a very big positive on the Rubrik side.

Look at what your SQL database is. If you're doing the industry standard of dump and sweep, migrate off of that as fast as you can. Get to the point where you're doing the native Rubrik backup for your databases as fast as possible. The industry-standard way can kill how much you can store on your systems, very quickly. That, in and of itself, is one of the biggest things that we learned the hard way. We thought we had a lot of time to move off and it bit us pretty hard for a period of time.

Another big lesson I've learned from using the solution is that you should use the system the way it wants to be used. There's a big mind change that you have to go through, to understand the way that the system works, depending on what you are coming from. We thought we had a good grasp of what we were actually backing up. But it turned out that there was a lot of hidden data growth that we were not expecting. That was mainly due to the fact that we had no good way of getting that information out of our previous system. If I knew everything I knew today, back when we were purchasing it, I would have bought more. But that comes with the territory of 20/20 hindsight. And having bad data, there's only so much that you can do.

Rubrik's Polaris, the SaaS-based framework for extracting metadata, sounds very interesting. We've not gone down that route at this point, but it's something that we'll be taking a look at within the next year or so.

In terms of maintenance of the system, it's pretty much just me. I'm the only one who really maintains it and, as I said, I might spend about one percent of my week dealing with the backups. It's very low maintenance.

Rubrik is a ten out of ten for sure, hands-down. They've been great. It's been one of the best engagements with a company that I've ever had.

The primary use case for Rubrik is backup and restore and as an archival system. We use it for backup and restore for virtual machines, managed volumes that are mounted and which we use for snapshots from Rubrik to endpoint devices, NAS shares from our Isilon system, as well as SQL databases, Oracle Databases, and Windows and Linux. We may have some failover cluster Windows shares going to it. It's for backups and restores of pretty much everything. It works really well in concert with Pure Storage technology. We have a really large Pure Storage environment and they play really well together.

The solution is on-prem and it's protecting environments that are on-premises exclusively at this point, although we have plans to push towards the cloud. Most of it is virtual but I'd be surprised if we didn't have at least half-a-dozen physical machines connected to it. 

I don't think that we have had an instance where we needed to recover en masse, like from a ransomware attack, but we have disaster recovery in production, and as part of our strategy we back up things that are also in test. Because it's test, sometimes things get configured wrong, and that's the whole point of the test. You figure out what works for you and the company and what solves the problem. But you break things in the process sometimes. It's really great to be able to do all of your testing and all of your work in testing without a great fear of really losing data or losing progress very much. We've had phone calls where they say, "Hey, I need XYZ restored, or I need this entire drive restored, or I need this entire VM restored." At the click of a button, five seconds later, it's back. It took longer for them to tell me what they needed back than it did to get it returned.

We try to run a disaster recovery test at least once a year. We want to make sure things are working, especially since here in Louisiana we have hurricanes. There could be a storm that comes in and we have to migrate our data and everything. The great thing is, we've got our data in both our production data center and our DR center. We're frequently doing those tests, we're frequently replicating between our different data centers. We do get a report about the replication status. With the exception of that, I don't think we really do much restore testing. But when we have restored, it has always worked. I never restored things before we had Rubrik so it's hard to know whether it reduces the time spent on recovery testing.

I know from my previous scenario in higher education, if the user on the phone said, "I know exactly the file and directory I need restored and I know exactly the day that I need it restored from," then I could probably do it in under 20 minutes. With Rubrik, I can do that in about 35 seconds, if I am already logged in. And in my previous occupation, that 20 minutes was only if the file was actually backing up. Frequently, we encountered issues where the file wasn't even backing up. Sometimes there were issues that we didn't get an email about and, as a result, we weren't backing things up. We only found out things weren't getting backed up because somebody needed some data. Overall, it's a huge reduction in time, if we're going from 35 minutes down to a minute.

And if Rubrik doesn't back up, we know it. If there's some issue where a system goes down and it can't take a snapshot, we know it. And that's good. It's not that I want to get those emails, but those are the emails that make you confident in your system. It has detected a problem and it immediately lets me know about it. And it tells me, "This is exactly the problem." I know exactly what I'm looking for.

It's great whenever I get a call that says, "Hey, I need this restored," because it's like I get to be a superhero. The person on the other end thinks their stuff is gone. They know, "Oh yeah, we have backups. And they might work, unless something happened and we don't have them." Whenever you give them their file back, and it's the last version that they edited, and their work is safe, it's really awesome. That's our validation. I have a lot of confidence in the system.

Regarding my team's overall productivity, here's the thing that's really great about Rubrik. It's really great that I could have someone who doesn't do this for a living. Provided that permissions were set up right, I could have a normal user, who is in charge of just his own data, go in and participate in restore operations. Rubrik is that much of a seamless, easy-to-use system. That's not just productivity for my team, a team full of people who do this every day. Users know they don't even have to ask. They can log in, they can get to what they're looking for because it's very easy to find, and they can restore it. Even though I may be one of the primary people to configure and deal with the nuts and bolts of it, that doesn't mean I'm the only one who can actually restore and get files back.

There's also the aspect that, whenever they commit a change or do something, as long as we're within our SLA snapshot time, they know that their changes are secure and that their changes will be there. So if they need to walk back or change something, they know they'll be able to. Again, confidence and trust in the system is fantastic.

The restore and backup agent is really great. It takes the load off of vSphere or vCenter or any of our ESXi hosts. It makes things just a dream to manage.

The fact that the API is so available to us with the playground — there's an internal and public playground — is also valuable. We can write API calls — and although I'm sure there's a way we could hurt the data — we write those calls with a lot of certainty that we won't be destroying anything. We write these API calls using really easy mechanisms and generate automation a lot faster. We can integrate into other systems that might not be as easy with other solutions. We can integrate Rubrik into the systems very easily because they give us the tools to do so.

Also, the web interface is really great. The design, from a user-experience standpoint, is really straightforward and easy to use. Sometimes you go to websites and you can immediately tell, "This is going to be a pain to use." The buttons are in weird placements or when you click on something it doesn't load very quickly. I don't know if Rubrik got it right on the first try or if they went through a lot of user testing, or maybe they hired some people that did user experience in the past. But they nailed it. Usually, from the very first panel, the dashboard that you land on after login, you've got most of your functionality right around where you need it to be. You've got your new items on the left, you've got your support on the top right. Nothing really seems out of place or just stuck in someplace.

Generally, within three or four clicks, I can get anywhere I need to be, whether that's restoring a snapshot or creating a new host. It's really fast. And from a technical standpoint, you can get to the interface from any of the nodes within the Rubrik cluster. You don't just explicitly have to go to the cluster host's name at the top level. You can go to any of the nodes that make up the cluster. So let's just say networking is hard, systems sometimes are hard and things can break. That's just a thing that happens with computers, they're not perfect — I wouldn't have a job if things were perfect. Let's just say something happens where you don't have access to the cluster. You can go to any of the cluster resources, any of the nodes in the cluster, and you can access virtually the same interface.

That's awesome, because usually, in the past, if something was down and it affected the cluster endpoint, the primary website, you would have to SSH in, you would have to go into command line, and reboot the server. There's no need to do that here. You have to lose your entire environment for it to go down.

In terms of SLA-based policy automation, I don't know what they were doing before Rubrik. I have to imagine there was a similar SLA system. For me, personally, I had a very static, flat rate of four weeks and that was it. If I wanted to have a separate set of SLAs, a separate 15-day SLA or a separate 20-day SLA, I had to stand up a completely separate version of that system and point things to that. Instead of having multiple SLAs in the same system, I had multiple systems that were exactly one SLA, which is a big management headache. There's a lot of overhead to that. You have to have another machine to run it, you have another cluster to run it. I don't know if this is a normal thing in the industry or if it's just a thing that all of a sudden I've seen, but of course you would do it this way. Everyone should do it this way.

For me, it was a really big eye-opener, being able to say for each resource, "You're going to be a 15-day at this time. That's every snapshot that you're going to have." It's continuous protection. It's really awesome that I get to work with a product that does that and does it well. I saw videos when I was learning about Rubrik. Other places have these features too, but they might not work as well. Frequently they don't. That's really one of the big selling points of the system.

Rubrik's archival functionality is a no-brainer. It doesn't require a ton of thought. I don't have to over-engineer different policies to validate what I think it's doing. If it says it's doing it, it's doing it, and it's really easy to click a button and say, "Now it's done." It's a very convenient piece of tech and I absolutely love it.

Regarding API support for integration with other solutions, we have not used it directly with any of the other hardware except Pure Storage. Pure Storage and Rubrik really go together well. We use a batch management control, which is like a job-controller. It's a modern solution, but it doesn't feel like a modern solution. The developers of it went in a different way, so it accepts command line and PowerShell, but with Rubrik's PowerShell modules and their API at a raw level, we're able to integrate it into pretty much anything. We're able to control when and where snapshots fire off and how to lock the different volumes to write- and read-only, depending on what we want to do. We're able to control that with our seemingly legacy — it's not actually legacy — system, even though there's not a direct integration.

It's the same thing with Isilon. Via a script mentality, and in concert with Adam Fox over at Rubrik, we're able to work with him and push all of our Isilon endpoints, all of our network shares from Isilon, into Rubrik, without having to go through the GUI. In our case, we had quite a lot of Isilon hosted storage. We were able to push that to Rubrik relatively seamlessly and simply because they had an API out there for us to use.

We have a lot of DBAs who are interested in Rubrik because, whenever you're a database administrator, I can't imagine that you'd have a lot of fun. You're always worried about mitigating loss. You have your database, and your replication of your database, and your backups for your database, and additional backups for your database, and then you need validation on those backups. The great thing is that Rubrik does most of that. It's not replication for databases, but it backs up the database and it's very seamless. It's very fast.

There are different settings that you can have on those backups to get a varying range of SLAs, where it's up-to-the-minute, or day or hour. You can get that continuous data protection, which is really great.

I joke around, every time we meet our SE, and say they could use a dark theme for the user experience. Everything else has a dark theme now, so it'd be cool if it had a dark theme. 

But on the serious side, I have a personal want which might not necessarily make sense with Rubrik as a company or Rubrik as a software, but it would be really nice if they could also handle things like item-level backups and restores of Active Directory objects and DNS and DCP objects.

In Active Directory there's a recycling bin where something goes if you delete it. I don't know if it's there for a static amount of time, like 90 days, or if it's until we hold 1,000 objects, so if you delete more things, the oldest ones go from the recycling bin. It would be really nice to have an additional layer of convenience, where if it's been in Active Directory for at least a day, and we're within our snapshot time, in addition to the machine itself, we have the actual objects in the Active Directory database so we can back that up. And similarly for DNS: all the records, all the zones, DHCP.

It would also be really great for DSS if they could somehow integrate it with Microsoft's technologies at a modular level. In general, I would like to see more integration with Microsoft at an item level. It already backs up the machine itself. We have the virtual machine which contains the database with DNS or the DHCP or Active Directory, but the restore operations, from a bare-metal restore like that, is technically very cumbersome. I don't know if it would just be a lot of built-in PowerShell scripting where it exports the data, saves that export in Rubrik somehow, and then imports it back in using a reverse method, but I think it would be really helpful if it could.

At one point I thought it would be really great to use it almost like SEPM where you could have modules or files where, instead of restoring back to its original location, you could distribute it to all of your restore points. I've walked back on that somewhat. I think that's a little too outside of the focus for Rubrik.

I personally have been using Rubrik for almost five months. It was deployed before I was working at my place of occupation. I used to work in higher education and I did the backups and the disaster recovery at that organization, amongst other things. When I came onboard at my present occupation, they said, "Here's the backup you're going to use, here's the system that we bought into, it's this thing called Rubrik." I said, "Cool. You've seen one system, you've seen them all. They all work." I believe the company has been using it for about a year.

Rubrik is incredibly stable. I'm getting out of that mode of thinking with Rubrik, "Well, maybe it won't work this time. Maybe it'll be down." It's never been down, it's never been inaccessible. If I can't connect to it, I'm typing the URL wrong. That's it.

We had other systems that are homegrown systems or even that were purchased. I don't know if there were technical aspects that were outside of our control, or that we just aren't mitigating or managing very well, with them. But as far as Rubrik is concerned, I've never had an issue accessing that on-prem system — and that's true even for our DR system which is technically on-prem but "over there," very far away. That includes nodes, the cluster. It's just been very good.

We have a lot of Rubrik, a lot of "bricks". If we needed more, we'd just buy more. The horizontal scaling is really great. I don't think we need anything immediately. But I could definitely imagine a moment in the past — not that I know that this happened — where we had ten nodes instead of the 50-something nodes we now have at each site, and we needed more and we put in more. I could totally see it all just working. It would just all of a sudden get better.

If we were ever pressed and at a point where we need something better, we needed more, I would imagine Rubrik would have a solution for us and it would work 100 percent. Whether that would be to PoC some new hardware and verify that it would actually improve our situation, or tweak a setting, or do a site survey to figure out what we're using and how to help, they would either get what we are using right now to work better, or they would figure out what we need to make it better moving forward.

That's scalability in a lot of ways. That's technical scalability in being consistent and stable and being able to improve and evolve. And that's stability and scalability and not having to plan your business processes around what should be a no-brainer issue. It's something that shouldn't drive your business. It should allow your business to be driven in whatever direction it needs to go. It should be something that just works, and so far I've seen it just works.

We have over 2,000 employees, and every one of those employees has some form of a computer and some have multiple: a laptop, or a laptop and a virtual machine, or just a virtual machine, or a laptop and two virtual machines. It's a big environment. We have hundreds of Windows Servers and about 100 Linux servers, if not more. We have pretty extensive Microsoft SQL environments which are either always-on clusters or a combination of always-on clusters and available clusters, and then we have some Oracle Databases as well.

I don't remember the exact number of what we're currently supporting in Rubrik, but I know it is a lot. We've integrated it in such a way — and this is a fairly normal process, but it's great — that whenever we put a machine online, part of the workflow is to get it to back up into Rubrik. Whenever we decommission things, it's to remove those backups 90 days after we remove the physical or virtual server. We keep backups X number of months after we remove the machine, just in case, depending on what our data retention policy is.

It's ingrained. We're invested. We made the jump.

While this might not count as a "tool," the support methodology with Rubrik is really interesting. When we need to do anything that is "invasive," if I have a question about how many upgrade-blocking things are in place, I open a support window, a ticket, and usually within ten minutes I'm contacted by someone, a real person, not just an automated system, at Rubrik.

It's really good. In my previous job to this one, I never really had an experience where the first response that I got back wasn't just an automated, robo-caller saying, "We've received your ticket, we will call you in a moment," and then two days later they would call. With Rubrik, you do get an email saying, "We've received your ticket and someone's going to call you." But within ten minutes, usually, and very rarely within any longer than 30 minutes, there is a real person on the phone calling me, who knows my name and is very aware of the situation. They're not asking me for a ton of information that I've already given in the ticket. They're really top-notch. And the support is integrated really well into the product.

That's not to say that we need support because things are broken. The support is there as an aid, as a tool for us. 

We upgraded a month ago to the version we're on. We're planning on upgrading to the latest version, which I think is 5.03. The great thing is that we're really close with support. They work well with us. We don't upgrade to beta or anything like that, but whenever something big is coming down, they'll usually let us know. We'll talk to them about it and they'll tell us "Hey, this is a cool thing that maybe you guys can utilize."

We replaced Avamar with Rubrik and it assumed the exact same role that Avamar had. I never got to use Avamar. It was decommissioned before I got to my current company.

When I worked in higher education, because we didn't have a lot of money to buy solutions, a lot of it was open-source. So I was the support and I was the deployment and I was the debugger and I was the guy that had to code all the integration. It was hard for me to have a vision of, and architect, how we were going to use things. Back then, we needed to use something and I needed to make it happen.

So in a lot of ways, Rubrik is my first big, differentiating factor in backup and restore software. It's not like we weren't able to do it at my previous organization, but this is a completely different realm. It's a totally different level with Rubrik. I'm not saying that Avamar wouldn't have been a similar feeling. But I hear what other people on the team who were using Avamar before are saying, and I get the feeling that Rubrik is leaps and bounds better in terms of validating that the backups actually happened and that they're there.

In terms of deployment of the solution, it was vendor-aided. Rubrik helped through our SEs. If I had to guess, it would probably be less than half-a-dozen people who were a big part of the deployment, data center access and data center deployment notwithstanding. Some people had to go and plug and rack things.

We aren't interested in lagging behind as far as updates go. We're pretty good about updating to the latest version. The only reason we haven't done so right now is because it's in use. We continue to use it and the organization I work for is big. There are a lot of teams using it. So it's hard finding the time in the day where we can disconnect everything, upgrade the system, and then reconnect everything. That's on our side where we're trying to juggle all the teams that are making use of the product.

I believe our company has seen return on investment by going with Rubrik, although I can't talk about it in detail. I'm not a finance guy. But from the way I hear people talk about previous products we were using, and from my personal experience of wasted time in managing and deploying and supporting free or open-source software, I believe there is ROI. We've definitely done whatever was necessary to make the cost worthwhile.

I remember hearing that we purchased a multi-year, contractual agreement. I don't know if we purchased the hardware outright or if it's a lease-to-own scenario.

My advice would be in the form of a question. If you have the money to purchase Rubrik, the real question is do you want success? Do you want it to work? Because if you want it to work and you want it to be easy — I don't know if Rubrik has won awards for support and service, although I feel like they should have — if you want that support for the few times that you need it, then you go with Rubrik.

It's a really good, seamless system. It's a no-brainer, sometimes. It just works.

I met up with them at VMworld and I actually got to talk to one of the people who was writing the PowerShell modules that I was using for an automation piece that I was writing. I got to ask that person, developer-to-developer, why did you make this decision? I asked a couple of very in-depth questions, and I don't get to do that with a lot of other companies, the companies that are just a logo or just a payment box and a data center. I don't feel Rubrik is a payment box and a data center. It's more than that, it's bigger than that, and that's really good. There are communities out there for Rubrik and I can speak with other developers and other teams that have implemented Rubrik, and that's awesome. It's not a support portal and it's not a place where you go to air your grievances. You go there to have fun, you go there to learn.

I don't know that I've ever used a product that's been quite like it. There are a couple of products that are similar. You definitely get a lot out of Pure Storage, which is very much the same thing, but that's storage, not backup and restore. The advice I would give is: It's not charity software, it's not "for-free" software. It does cost, but what you're buying is a solution that will actually work. It will carry whatever weight you want to give it. And you're also getting the team that helped make it great.

We have not needed to use Rubrik's ransomware recovery yet. Thankfully we've been spared from having to utilize that component. But when I was at VMworld 2019 recently and I was watching a class on ransomware recovery, it was one of those things where thought, "Wow, I didn't even really know we had this." But we totally have this. We have Rubrik, and this is neat. I ended up talking to one of our SEs about it after the fact, and he said, "Yeah, well, you haven't needed it and hopefully you never will."

I believe some of our application developer teams are using Rubrik. They might not realize they're using it though, because a lot of the integration we put in is to back up the machines that they do work on, but they don't realize that we're backing them up. That's kind of sneaky. We're devious like that. We try to protect our users even from themselves sometimes.

For day-to-day maintenance there are only two or three people. I'm one of them, and I have another member on my team who is involved. We also have one of the database administrators who plays a big role in it. My passion, and where I fit perfectly in the team, is doing a lot of scripting. I'm a general-purpose solutions engineer with a focus in PowerShell, Active Directory, and Microsoft integration.

I don't like typically giving tens, because that says there's no room for improvement. But functionally, it's a 9.99999, which rounds up to a ten.

We like this product because of its simplicity, pricing and reliability. 

This solution is stable.

This solution is scalable.

The tech support is extremely helpful.

It was a straightforward setup. It was simple to do.

It is a great value, but its cost is still high.

• Daily backups at different intervals
• Audits
• Live mounting of production servers
• DR

We are a 90 percent VM environment. We have a different OS environment, as well as databases.

The product is simply easy to use, efficient, and its out-of-the-box configuration just works. The SLA policy set makes it easy to manage and forget about time conflicting backup schedules. We have had a few recoveries, and this solution worked very well.

The live mounting and compatibility of different operating systems is great. Rubrik can also serve as a secondary host for emergency recoveries. It is fast and efficient.

I would like to have a built-in index searching ability of files/system files within the Rubrik interface to determine if a file or item exists, rather than just recovering it, and then doing a search for the file afterwards.

No issues.

No issues.

Support is very friendly, easy to work with, and showed great expertise in the product. 

We used Avamar, and it was complicated.

The initial setup is straightforward. We were up and running within an hour.

We had the vendor team onsite, and it was super fast to set up.

As little downtime as possible. 

The product is not cheap, but for good reason. It simply works and is very fast.

We thought about Veeam.

Give it a try and find out for yourself if it is for your environment.

We are an MSP and offer Rubrik as a backup service to customers on private and public cloud environments and internally managed environments. We run the solution against VMware and Hyper-V with minimal physical systems.

Currently, there is no support for image-level backups on systems in Azure and AWS from Rubrik. Presently we use agent-level backups however this is not ideal for fast whole system recovery. The next version (4.2) has support for image backups, and this will be investigated for functionality when released.

The legacy backup solution required large capital expenditure upfront and was not easy to scale, required a high degree of technical expertise to operate, and featured time-consuming upgrades which required a lot of troubleshooting post-upgrade. The system also had many limitations around the number of concurrent hot mount operations.

Rubrik, on the other hand, is very easy to scale, can be operated by junior staff, and upgrades to date have been seamless. Each time we add a Brik we gain additional backup and restore performance. They claim performance at up to 30k IOPS per Brik, however, I suspect the actual figure to be below that. Having said that, we can instantly recover an entire customer's environment in minutes and run happily on the system until a storage vMotion is completed to production storage without any issues.

Google-like file search is another invaluable tool to quickly find and restore files directly to your browser. This feature has saved significant time for end users who can’t remember where they saved a file.

• Google-like file search
• System scaling
• Ease of use/upgrade/addition of capacity.
• Frequent development cycle which is typically 3 months between feature releases.
• Direct feedback to product managers is invaluable, features we have requested are typically added to the next product release.
• Product support team is excellent, with issues typically being resolved the same day.
• Although not in large-scale use at the moment, the ability to convert a VMware image backup to an EC2 instance will be of great use moving forward to provide disaster recovery to the cloud when required.

• Global management of multiple systems is lacking, as is reporting across multiple installed units. This is presently a development item in the Polaris platform, however the current capabilities do not justify the price tag.
• MFA/SAML support to improve security for login to the backup system.
• Image-level backup for Azure and AWS with storage held outside of the Azure/AWS account so that if an account breach does occur backups and primary data would not be compromised in a single attack.

No

No

Avamar with Data Domain, which was expensive and hard to manage, and had poor product updates.

The initial setup was done in one to two hours, with racking the equipment being the most time-consuming part of the install.

If you are unsure, get a POC unit and see how easy backups can be to manage, and how easy restores are.

Veeam, Avamar, and Cohesity.

As a financial company, we are under stringent data compliance, availability, and integrity rules. We use Rubrik to enhance governance of data archiving, as well as the backup and restore production environment consisting of multiple converged systems. We are also looking into the feasibility of using Rubrik as part of the firm's BCDR efforts and enhancement of the development environment.

Rubrik has led to improvement by reducing the amount of failed backups, leading to a reduced workload in IT operations. It has a streamlined user interface, provides an improved tech support experience, and reduces the time required to locate and restore data.

Automation with PowerShell allowed us to realize the additional benefits of integrating Rubrik with other PowerShell-capable systems within the same framework. 

We run Microsoft Exchange on physical servers, and we are looking into simplified physical Microsoft Exchange server backup and restore capabilities.

Currently, more properties and methods are exposed via REST API when compared with PowerShell. Improving PowerShell integration would greatly simplify Rubrik management.

We use the Rubrik solution to back up our private cloud environment with hundreds of virtual machines.

The old method of backup wasn't the right product for our cloud solution. The restore and backup times took to long.

The most important feature is the instant recovery of virtual machines. It allows us to restore services in minutes.

We need one system to manage all the Rubrik clusters. We are now looking into Rubrik Polaris as a solution.

It's a very stable solution.

Not at all.

All of the Rubrik engineers know everything about their products.

We used NetBackup in the past but it didn't fit with our new requirements.

Straightforward.

A Rubrik engineer configured the system for us at location.

The instant recovery is what we needed. I don't know the exact ROI.

I can't speak for others, but look at what you require in your environment.

NetBackup, Veeam and Cohesity

Have a look at the Rubrik API Playground to automate a lot of processes.

We are searching for a new backup product that reduces man hours and helps us automate more of the backup and recovery process for our MSP team.

We used to primarily be a Veeam shop when it came to doing backups in our data center and I never thought I would look for another product. However, some issues started cropping up with very large virtual machines that Veeam didn't have an easy way to solve. I decided to try out Rubrik. I can tell you that it was one of the best decisions we have made. It fixed all of our backup issues and cut backup remediation to nearly nothing. We've gained at least ten hours a week and I never have to worry about whether something is being backed up or not.

Automation functions, image based backup, and the ability to instantly recover anything from files to databases.

We have also implemented CloudOn which allows us to deploy backed up virtual machines stored offsite in Azure instantiated as an Azure virtual machine and spun up. It's a perfect scenario for low cost, full disaster recovery.

I wish it had image-level backups available for Hyper-V 2012. I additionally would like for it to implement some of the functions that Veeam Cloud Connect has so that I can deploy an agent on a physical server and just start backing that up to one of our Briks. It can technically be done now but the Brik has to be able to talk to the server directly, so a direct path or VPN is required.

Nope

Nope

Customer service is top notch, which I am usually pretty disappointed in. So far it's the best I've seen for a tech company. Their service is far beyond my expectations.

We used Veeam and switched because of ease of use and time savings.

Initial Setup was simple.  I think the box took longer to mount in the rack than it did to setup.  

Rubrik came onsite for our initial deployment.  Subsequent installs we've done ourselves.  

Rubrik is an expensive product, more expensive than most.  However, the larger the environment you have, the quicker you will see savings in man hours.  We rarely have to touch our backup environment anymore as its so well designed, managed and automated.

We did not look elsewhere because Veeam was already at the top of the list.

If you can afford this product, I fully recommend it. You will not look back.